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Emily Alford

Reading Riki

By Emily Alford

A while ago I found that my local Borders Books and Music has a gender section. The first book I bought from it was Kate Bornstein's GENDER OUTLAW. I cruised the shelves a while before I dared to buy. It was almost like walking into a lingerie section in boy drag. But I bought it.

Other people were buying it too, and books like it. The computers in the Borders headquarters do not care about the sex or perceived gender of the people who plunk down their credit cards. Like Vicky's Secret or Marks and Spencer, what counts is sales. I kept going back to Borders and kept buying more, several books at a time, still in boydrag. Did I get read for what I was buying? Who cares? I'm in Borders too, on the history shelves, and I hope that a few people are buying me. What counts is not getting read by some clerk, but what I found to read.

I found a lot, and finally I found Riki Wilchins. READ MY LIPS: SEXUAL SUBVERSION AND THE END OF GENDER. The publisher is Firebrand Books and the ISBN is 1-56341-090-7. It wasn't the first time I had read what Wilchins had to say. I've seen her pieces on the TS Menace and Gendertalk websites. I thought I knew what to expect. When I started to read the book, I was surprised. What follows is not a review. It seems to me (having written more than a few reviews) that a reviewer should be able to claim a strong position in relation to the author. I'm not in that position. So this is more an attempt (pardon the pun) to read Riki Wilchins.

Anytime a person reads, it's from a template, a set of expectations. Even Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot the Dog provided a template when I was just starting to read (about the same time I remember first putting on a dress). I hope that Riki Wilchins won't mind that my template was Norman Mailer.

That is nowhere near as bad as it sounds. During the Vietnam era Mailer foresook his hairy-chested war story persona and involved himself heavily in the peace movement. In THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT he meditates on the psychology of commitment. He went to the great Pentagon demonstration of 1967 prepared to go some distance. But he realized that there were others more committed than he, more prepared to put themselves entirely on the line. I was part of that era. I wasn't at the Pentagon, but I faced the same dilemma--how far did I dare go? I did go pretty far because it seemed to me that a major issue was at stake. For the record, my quarrel was always with the fool statesmen who got my country into that mess, not to the people of my own generation who responded to their country's call as they heard it. But I did go pretty far (and yes, I did inhale).

Mailer poses that problem: how far does a person go? He puts it in terms of machismo. This may be a peace demonstration, but what's Your particular guts quotient? And that provided my template as I started to read Riki.

Fair enough. Riki is a seriously out and entirely political transsexual and I'm closeted still, about sixty percent. She mounts demonstrations and TS Menace Actions. I hope I don't cower, but I remain "discrete." Riki's own writings reveal a woman who is pretty adventurous in sexual terms. I'm pretty much vanilla, even on sundae. So, I figured, it's a case of two different worlds, not two people in the same world.

READ MY LIPS surprised me. Maybe the key is the cover art. On the front there are two pretty intimidating photos of her. On the back, however, another photo presents a confident but entirely vulnerable person. Inside the book, the same is true. One of Wilchins' themes is that we transgendered people are who we are, all of us, and labels within our community be damned. Addressing genetic women, she says bluntly "Our cunts are not the same." Addressing even hesitant cross-dressers, she asks "What does it cost to tell the truth?" Addressing sexually vanilla people, she describes the anxiety of entering a scene that I cannot even imagine joining, and describes her own doubts and fears.

I read the book with fascination, but also with emphathy and even--dare i say this--with sisterhood. And there lies the point where the Riki Wilchins I read and the Norman Mailer template that I brought to her book did not fit together.

Has she gone beyond me, as somebody at the Pentagon went beyond Norman Mailer? In an important way, of course she has. But unlike Mailer, she doesn't pose the problem in terms of how far a person dares to go, of "what's YOUR guts quotient?" The issue instead is where we all have been, including her, and where we are now, including her. She doesn't tempt us to follow her. She challenges us all to embrace one another, and ourselves.

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